Monday, January 4, 2010

Here's a scrubs catalog picture of a nurse, happily demonstrating the inside pockets of her white coat.

How do we know she's not a real nurse?

1. The coat is spotless.

2. Very few nurses wear these white coats anymore.

3. Only people in training carry books in their pockets. A real nurse's pockets have tape, scissors, hemostats, pens, a granola bar, a "buy 500 get 1 free" Starbucks punchcard, and a hospital ID.

Another point: Although I don't know what Nurse K looks like, this could be a picture of her, taken at the critical moment when she's tired of putting up with a drunk patient's shit and is smilingly drawing her Taser.

Why on earth do they make lab coats *white* anyway? It seems totally asinine--whether one is seeing patients, dissecting cadavers, or staining microscopic critters--hell, even just hanging the damn thing up in the car!--it gets dirty. (And don't try to tell me it's so that it can be bleached, because that never gets human goo out.)

Her smile is creeping me out! And, she looks so clean & comfortable -- very unrealistic. If I wore a white coat it would have coffee stains on it within 10 sec, and I would be dripping with sweat within 10 min.

What's with the pocket under, anyway? More chance to have an ink pen explosion giving rise to permanent damage. But, as a pharmacist (old school) I keep a pocket-sized copy of Sanfords, renally eliminated drugs, opiate conversions, STAT code dosing, and I would keep a antipsychotic doses if there was any consistency in dosing! What is the most irritating is that the pockets are never deep enough that calculators don't fall out, especially unnerving when using commode; one would think after losing several to the john, I'd have come up with a fix for the TI-30.

Anon & Anon: the top of the page said something like "Nursing coats". So that is why I assumed they were nurses. I didn't bother to scan in the whole page for space-saving reasons. Sorry to offend you.

When I wore scrubs, the pants would get so full of stuff that they would start to fall down. 4 pockets and an elastic waist are not compatible.

The lab coat pockets would grab every doorknob in the hospital and yank me around for a spin. During a Code Blue once, my pocket got hooked on the way out of the door when I was running at speed to the phone. I was yanked around and body-slammed into the door. Full-stop!! I was stuck on the handle and so I pulled. Hard. All of my pocket junk spilled out on to the floor and the coat was torn apart at the seams. I kicked all the crap out of the way but that was the last time that I wore a lab coat.

I grabbed one of those Baby Phat lab coats today. I was asked, last night at midnight to go home early so I could come back in this morning to babysit our intern (have to have one senior doc on at all times) and after working 9/10 days, I am out of clean scrubs/lab coats. Let me say, they are more flattering than the plain ones. Though they have the annoying label stamp on the back, below the collar that made my receptionist think that my coat was on inside out.

So, by the end of the day, I had blood, betadine, feces, urine, propofol (can't see *that* on white), and anal gland juice (animal scent glands) on it. Boom, into the hospital laundry.

She is a nursing student....where I did my clinicals the docs and the nursing students wore long coats, the med students wore short ones. This was very important! It would have been horrible to mistake a nursing student for an intern!

(That's what they told us, anyhow...apparently, no big deal if you mistook a nursing student for an attending).

LOL! My wife is a med/surg/oncology nurse and her pockets contain everything you mentioned except the Starbucks card (we prefer the more reasonably priced, and better tasting Dunkin' Donuts coffee). You had it right down to the granola bar, NICE JOB! The only people in our hospital that wear those coats are those we refer to as the "clean white lab coats" who walk around from meeting to meeting but don't actually "do" anything. They call themselves "management" but if the hospital was truely left to them it's go bankrupt. Additionally, she never smiles like that at work.

The nurses at my hospital pretty much never wear white - until they are a manager. Then they were the whole long white starched coat thing which never has any opportunity to get dirty except for ring around the collar.

Welcome to my whining!

This blog is entirely for entertainment purposes. All posts about patients may be fictional, or be my experience, or were submitted by a reader, or any combination of the above. Factual statements may or may not be accurate.

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